Crack on Toast
by Takanami
Summary: After an unfortunate surprise in an MI6 office involving a carcass courtesy of the Nightside, Alex Rider decides to get a little payback by way of offering John Taylor an invitation.


So... This was written two months ago by two sisters greatly distressed by the end of the Nightside series, and then subsequently by the series' lack of fanfiction. Something had to be done. Thus, after a serious amount of sugar inhalation and enough caffeine to make the normal human high, we simultaneously put together two parts of the same story.

It was written (insert large number) months ago, at the same time we had the vague idea that maybe we should write another chapter for Kanda's Apprentice (it will come off the unintentional hiatus soon, I promise!), so let us know that it was worth doing that. It was fun to write, at least.

* * *

Alex looked around, distinctly unimpressed and making it visibly evident. He wondered, for barely a moment, what if meant if the moon was so much larger here. If he'd been pointed towards one of those damn timeslips again…

Of course, he glanced almost worriedly down at the short woman standing outside the train station with him, timeslips weren't necessarily the worst part of visiting the darker side of London. Cathy, as she'd been introduced, was dressed like the typical wild college girl: a dark red skirt three inches too short to be even marginally appropriate, a tight shirt displaying some alternate reality where Britney Spears was the lead singer for Avenged Sevenfold and plenty of midriff, beat-in Salvation Army knee-high boots that may very well have been used as indicated by the blood splatter and what appeared to be clusters of bullet holes midcalf with dangerous looking heels, and a bandolier of irradiated, holy grenades strapped in the latest style across her tiny waist. Okay, maybe not the typical wild college girl, but that was the closest thing he could get to an analogy. She was his tour guide for the moment, and walking with her was almost as worrying to his health as getting stuck in timeslips. She had something against taxis and the taxis, if that's what they could be called, had something against her. It had led to some…interesting new experiences. There had been more than a dozen corners left in utter disrepair with fault falling almost equally on both sides. Almost equally, but it was definitely leaning more and more on the heavily grenade-invested side.

"Are you positive we're going the right way?"

She gave him an absolutely breathtakingly cheerful smile. "Not in the slightest, Mr. Rider, sir!"

"Just checking."

The bordering street appeared to be entering a gang war, based on the current clusters, the difference in weaponry and the symbols sprayed on to their doors. Not once had Alex ever imagined that vehicles could use each other as body shields, but that was exactly what they were doing. On the rare occasion, they messed with the wrong car and wound up as no more than twitching scraps of metal embedded in nearby walls. Curiously, the limousines in all their multitudes of shapes and sizes, dominated the streets but never initiated or provoked fights. Their goal seemed to be to simply decimate anything and everything that got in the way of their destination; he hadn't seen one torn asunder yet.

Cathy had continued to speak at speed of light lengths about whatever went through her short attention span, and as the only snatches he caught didn't go together, he gave up on trying to understand her altogether.

It wasn't until he was a couple steps from the oldest bar in the world that he realized that some things in the Nightside never changed. "Avalon is still here?"

"Well of course. I mean, Strangefellows—that's what we call it now—survived the Angel War, so the rest of eternity can't be that hard."

"No, I just figured that someone would finally manage to torch it down, or…hell, ignore me. Merlin's protecting the damn thing. It might as well be immortal. Who's in charge of it in this time?"

"This time?" She made a vaguely pouty face, putting her hands on her hips by somehow circumventing the lessened load of ammunitions, but perked up again just as quickly. "You certainly get around Mr. Rider, sir, but then any friend of the Authorities is an insurance risk to me so I won't press the interrogation except that I want to know if an investment in the Necropolis would be a good choice."

"The Necropolis exists mostly outside of time, so I guess it couldn't be a bad one." He reconsidered his words, found that they made some kind of sense, and shrugged. "So which poor Morrisey is running the place nowadays?"

"Alex," she nearly cooed. "Shares your name. He's absolutely adorable and sulky and keeps his wardrobe to black."

"Sounds like a great guy."

"And even though he isn't the sentimental sort, he's holding on to the bar."

That's new, he thought. "The bar isn't tied to the Morrisey line anymore?"

"Not since John's mother came and wrecked the place. Lilith came through and killed Merlin…well, killed him again. We're pretty sure he's down for good this time, but his protections still keep the place decently neutral and safe. They haven't helped with the cleaning last I looked, but maybe someday we'll get lucky."

Alex whistled. Merlin re-dead, maybe even permanently so. That was always good news. He and the guy had never seen eye-to-eye, and he considered that a rare blessing. Of course, Merlin hadn't felt so inclined.

Thus how he came to be here now.

"And you're sure John Taylor would be here?"

"I'm his secretary, Mr. Rider, sir. There are few things I am not sure of and one of them would be the boss's location at any given moment. What I can give you is that this is where a lot of people come looking for him, me included."

Never a straight answer in this place, though he loved its unusually blunt honesty and deception. Nothing in the Nightside claimed to be what it stood for, and frequently it could quite suddenly change. It was such a nice break from the usual politics. Never a straight answer, but always an answer nonetheless. Not a place he would like to sleep, but somewhere he enjoyed visiting. Most of the time. For a couple minutes, at the most. Maybe an hour or two.

Cathy pranced right through the discreet front door of Strangefellows, tossing out hellos and haven't-seen-you-in-awhiles and fuck-offs to wind up in front of the bar, gazing adoringly at the bartender. Alex Morrisey had clearly seen better, younger days, but that wasn't getting in the way of his stubbornly dark apparel, the attempt to cover his balding forehead, and the sense of brooding that emanated from the man. As he followed in his guide's footsteps, trying to tune out the screeching by an off-pitch vocalist who kept changing colors at a dizzying pace and ignore the disturbingly pregnant vulture whose glare could have rivaled the bartender's, he finally noticed the man in the white trenchcoat sulking over an empty shot glass sitting beside his guide.

"How was I to know that the actors had made their own dimension? That seems like something they would have mentioned before I took it apart."

"Hey, boss. This guy wants to talk to you, and it sounds urgent."

PI John Taylor turned to face MI6 spy Alex Rider, both of them critically assessing one another, trying to find an obvious chinks in the others' armor.

"I like the coat," Alex finally remarked, deciding that this was the man he needed to speak to.

"I like the…missile launcher." John looked over the decidedly large size of weaponry slung over the teenager's shoulder and raised an eyebrow.

"It was a gift," he shrugged off.

"I hope not from around here, though you seem unusually comfortable in this part of London. Tell me, are you as human as you look? They tell me the pure ones are…resilient…" At this point he looked pointedly at the animated secretary by his side "…but I'm always the skeptic."

"100% human, but I'm sure something's wrong with me."

They had another stare-off which dissolved rather quickly into awkwardness.

"So, I gather that you want to talk to me about something?"

"As a matter of fact, I'm just a messenger for today, so no shooting. There's this gathering in London proper that many high-ranking politicians and internationally relevant guests will be attending, and you have been chosen and/or elected to the position of the Nightside's representative at the affair." He held out a daintily embellished envelope, bearing some major federation or other's emblem across the seal and "Nightside representative" scrawled in delicate cursive only achievable by technology or pre-21st century women.

"Bloody… How did I get this?" the PI demanded indignantly. "This kind of thing is a mockery to my very name!"

"Well I originally went to Henry to try and persuade him…"

"Henry?"

"Oh. Henry Walker. You know him?"

"Know him?!"

Cathy patted her boss's arm soothingly. "It's a long story. They're sort of like frenemies."

"Ah. Umm, okay. Anyway, he doesn't want to go. Says it's bothersome and he couldn't stand to be seen as the representative of such a filthy place that… You get the idea. So I asked him who I should see, and he thought you would be a suitable replacement."

"This is the last straw!" John proclaimed. "That damn man is trying to drive me insane!" He simmered for a moment, sipped at his glass, and immediately the momentary rage was gone, replaced by a look of pain. With a careful glance at the blue liquid, the tumbler was quickly pushed a good distance away. "So you came here because Walker sent you? I didn't think he would sink to such depths to the point of using plain mortals to do his bidding."

Alex shook his head with a smirk. "Oh he didn't. He only wishes he could get me to do his bidding. I actually had another candidate in mind before following his advice, but Mr. Advent is a busy man and he had no desire to attend such a gathering when he could be doing more interesting tasks. At that point I found your secretary and sought you out."

John's fingers snaked around the glass before he forcefully pulled them back with a frown. "You got past Walker?"

"Yeah, well, like I said. You get look hard enough and I'm sure something's wrong with me." He smiled in a way that said nothing of innocence and everything of a dark inner laughter.

When John turned away from the duel with his blue liquor-like drink to look, really See the teenager clad in jeans, a tee with two dinosaurs cursing at each other and some kind of specially designed missile launcher, said teenager crossed his arms and tipped his head in an almost curious gesture to the side. Accompanying the head shift, Alex seemed to crackle in static as if reality weren't set to the right station, before returning to his previously normal appearance. John frowned, only resigning to unsated curiosity as a trickle of blood fell on his lip. "That's quite the talent you have, kid."

"It's a curse," he admitted. "I tripped into a misplaced timeslip on a mission for MI6 last year and to shorten the story, Merlin and I had a minor disagreement that resulted in him relocating me from this reality to a tangential one. I got back to this one, but after being relocated, I just can't quit slipping between them. It's quite disorienting, as you can imagine, but it has its benefits such as being resistant to both Walker's Voice and your Sight. That, and I'm apparently immortal so long as I spend little time in this reality."

"So what's this other reality like?"

"It's…dark. And sideways. My vision and balance have greatly improved as a result."

Cathy tilted her head sideways, mimicking the spy's gesture. "Does it get tiring, holding your neck at that angle?"

"Very much so. I have a new appreciation for chiropractors."

"Well, I do have an open schedule—" he looked over to his secretary to confirm what he thought.

"Open? I haven't seen deserts more dried out and penniless than your schedule."

"You've never seen a desert, Cathy."

"I've seen pictures and 5D renderings, and that's enough for me."

"As I was saying, I have an open schedule, so I guess meeting important people—"

"And wrecking irreparable havoc," Alex Morrisey helpfully added.

"And reworking the insurance company's payment systems," Cathy noted.

"—and getting away from all these terribly impressionable people would be a possibility." He glared them all down, daring them to try again.

Cathy shrugged. "I'm just giving him suitable warning ahead of time and preparing my 'I told you so.' I don't know how well London's insurance covers compares to the Nightside."

"Probably better," the bartender muttered.

"True."

John sighed. "When is it?"

"I have no idea. My own invitation is unopened right now. I'm representing England, so you should see me there if nothing's already gone drastically and horribly wrong, as it so often does when I'm around."

"Maybe you two shouldn't both be in here so soon after the Angel War." Alex Morrisey was suddenly anxious at having two of the worst catastrophe magnets in the known world together in his bar. "I haven't completely recovered my losses."

"I'll see you there then," Alex said evenly, purposely looking at John and not his companions. "Feel free to bring a guest or two. We could use the entertainment."

As the teenager turned to leave, John grasped his shoulder, intending to ask him why exactly the regular, boring world outside the sinful Nightside would feel the need to have a representative at some gathering all of a sudden. He suddenly felt his heart jump and his stomach lurch dangerously as the world took an abrupt 34° turn and his surroundings dissolved into murky static. The moment he let go of Alex, he felt the floor right itself and the buzzing became the familiar screech and gloom of Strangefellows once more.

Alex smirked, taking a step back. "I'll see you there." He briefly became a 3D mass of static before disappearing altogether.

Morrisey snorted. "Kids these days."

[two months later]

Ben sighed again. John, nowhere within hearing distance but listening through the comms system the agent was wearing because of sheer boredom, sniggered. "I'm pretty sure you weren't supposed to drag me along," Ben said. He hadn't realized John was listening, but then it wasn't like he expected someone to be tagging along in their conversation. And truly, he was just doing this because he had absolutely no purpose in being there and was so irrevocably bored that he had to entertain himself somehow.

"Yeah, no, but everything's so boring here, and I hate politics, so I had to have someone to make snide comments to. It looks weird if I'm just standing in a corner talking to myself," Alex replied, hovering beside him in a corner. It wasn't like Ben had much interest in venturing out either, so the pair was just hiding in the shadows, more or less. They had only been approached a few times. That was more than John had gotten. Most had just thrown dirty and unwelcoming looks his way. "And it's not like you had anything better to be doing."

"I can think of a stack of paper Crowley dropped off right before we left."

"Like I said, nothing better."

Ben shrugged, giving him a point for that. Still, he had to make a point. "You honestly cannot think of anyone here who you could get into an interesting conversation with?" John saw Ben look around at the horde of party attendees, composed of 'representatives' from countries around the world.

At that moment, Alex looked straight at John across the room. John, doing the somewhat decent thing, grinned wholeheartedly and waved enthusiastically like a school kid. Alex snorted. "Could probably get into a peculiar one with the guy over there who's gathering unwelcome attention like a whore does herpes and who's also hijacked your communication system and listening to our conversation, but he looks like he's having more fun just pissing off everyone else by simply being here and sulking in that corner."

Ben whipped around, most likely at the offense of his system being taken over, and glared at John. He nodded, happily, and again did the somewhat decent thing and walked over. The people around him moved, whether they knew it or not. He wondered if it was just from his aura, or if they just didn't want to be affiliated with him in any way.

He came to a stop by the pair. "I'm as sorry to disappoint you as I would be reluctant to kick you off a building, which, considering you dragged me here and delivered the message, is not a good thing, but I may be unexpectedly departing at some point. I'll be sure to make it as a loud and obnoxious and party-crashing-ing as possible, so I guess I'll rid you of some of your boredom."

"That sounds delightful. Do we have time to get popcorn?"

"I'm not completely sure." John flicked his gaze over to Ben, taking in the irritation the older man seemed to be getting. "You're upset about the comms system, aren't you? If it helps, nobody else will be hijacking it... at least, not through my method. I don't know how it actually works, so..."

"Taylor, nobody does anything the same way as you," Alex said with a snort.

"We all piss the same, I'm pretty sure. Well, everyone here does, anyway. Not back home... I don't want to think about how they do it back home..."

"I'm not letting anyone drag me to the Strangefellows bar again."

"Even after seeing that marvelously handcrafted penis sign on the guy's bathroom door?"

"Yeah, no."

Ben's expression was morphing into one of... something... by the end of this conversation. On the other end of the comms system, he could hear somebody laughing hysterically in the security room. Somebody else told him to shut up, but the laughter just continued. "So that's where you were when you delivered the message..." Ben muttered to Alex.

"And you don't want to know where else," the teenager said. "It got a lot stranger."

"That's the Nightside, for you." He looked around. "I'm here...why, again?"

"Somebody has to represent the Nightside."

Ben frowned. "That, whatever it is, wasn't on the list of countries represented."

John laughed. "Me? Representing the Nightside? You couldn't represent the Nightside with a barrel full of elf puss dunked in water Razor Eddie's bathed in, if he's ever even considered the idea. I suppose the water and bath would've run away behind the plumbing if he ever had, but y'know, theoretically."

Alex frowned thoughtfully. "Is it odd that I can see the possibility of that actually happening, considering what else happened over there?"

"What did, exactly, happen?" Ben gathered the courage to ask.

After a minute of half-starts, pauses, winces, groans, and otherwise more stalls, John and Alex finally settled on looking sympathetically at Ben and shaking their heads. "You... really don't want to know," Alex finally said.

John suddenly waved that away. "Back to the representing thing. Why am I here? I don't even represent our meager crap pit of a government system. You people say your legal bodies don't do anything..."

"I remember your road system. That was... the incarnation of hell-don't even say anything," Alex quickly threatened as John started to tell him about the real incarnation of Hell. He smirked triumphantly.

"And the representing thing?" he pushed.

"Ah..." Alex grinned unabashedly. "I figured I owed somebody over there for ditching the office with a half-roasted pig with its entrails coming out of its eyes and a small archaeopteryx feasting on its legs."

"I was wondering where that went...!" John muttered. The pig had been on a bad makeshift pedestal at Strangefellows while Alex took bets on who could get who to eat it and how long it would last if someone didn't. Then the archaeopteryx somehow managed to get in, and started gnawing on it. One day, it just disappeared. Like everything else in the Nightside does on occasion.

"So you did have something to do with it!"

"I had nothing to do with it! I'm not liable for blame, suing, finger pointing, finger painting, killing, hex-laying, or organ-taking."

"Does that sort of thing happen... often?" Ben finally asked, a little unnerved by his partner's nonchalance about the whole conversation.  
"See, I told you it would be a peculiar conversation," Alex said cheerfully.

In answer to the question, John nodded, and replied, "On a daily basis, normally. Sometimes two to three times. The finger painting is when it really gets bad, though."

Ben looked at Alex. "Yeah, sorry, that one's beyond me even trying to explain."

A man was walking towards them, coming from the direction of the rest of the party-goers. "Who's that?" John asked the pair, knowing he was coming without having to look.

"American senator," Alex replied. "President was sick, vice president had other plans, I think the Secretary of State heard you were coming... Got pushed down to this poor guy, eventually."

"How'd the Secretary of State hear I was coming when no one knows what the Nightside is here?" John frowned.

"Intuition?" Alex shrugged.

The senator finally made his way up to them. Conversation nearby had stopped, wanting to get an ear in on what was going to be said to the stranger. "It has come to our attention-" the senator carefully started.

"Fuck off."

"Okay."

And the senator skid-daddled right back the way he had come.

"And you wondered why we needed someone from the Nightside," Alex mused.

"Entertainment purposes," John guessed. "Or did you want someone to blow something up, steal one of someone's very important organs, or do something of the heinous nature?"

"I think it was amusement purposes."

On the comm unit, the laughter had been pretty much nonstop. Finally, a door slammed, and it sounded like they had just kicked the person out to quiet him. "Alright!" a very pissed off person said from the other end, most likely that way because of the person he'd been working with. "What the hell's the Nightside?"

"If you're asking that," John said, amused, "you should also ask where, when, how and why. Who's in it might be the safest and most dangerous question, depending on who the answer includes."

After a pause, Ben prompted, "Well?"

"The Nightside's in London, but not really. It's... an alter ego version, I suppose you could say. The Nightside is the place where everything the ordinary world wants to forget about goes to, whether it wants to or not. It's the place where you can get anything, for a price. Neither Heaven nor Hell can touch it, but it's affected by both. And it's the last place you want to find yourself in."

"Amen," Alex muttered. "If I haven't gotten it from all my missions, I'm pretty sure I got PTSD from my one-day venture into there. I'm still concerned about my mental status."

Ignoring the teen's grumblings, John continued. "Its existence is a mystery no one has been able to find out before, and possibly has never wanted to find out before. The Nightside is the place you go to when you want to sink to the bottom of the heap, but it's also the place you go when you're done with the regular reality as we know it. But it's a place where you need to leave fear and reason at the entrance if you want to get out in one piece."

"...Never seen that part of London before," someone else on the communications system muttered.

"And with any luck, you never will," Alex said. "Now, I'm sorry to interrupt your spiel, Taylor, but is that K-Unit on security detail?"

"Yes, and it's quickly turning into the best one we've ever had yet," the man who had been snickering said, a door closing at the same time. "Would I be wrong to say that's Cub speaking?"

"Nope, you'd be right."

"Hey, if you don't mind, we never got your name," the first person to speak reasonably said.

"John Taylor," John said simply. "Please tell me those drinks over there are not the strongest they have here."

"Most people don't have standards such as yours to judge by," Alex pointed out.

"How sad that must be for all of you," John said. "Where are you guys from?"

"SAS," Eagle said.

John had a weird look come over his face. "Wait... What?"

"Based here in England. Elite forces," Alex sighed. "Not... the other SAS."

The second voice in the room said, "What's the other SAS?"

"The Salvation Army Sisterhood."

"And what do they do?"

"...A lot of smiting."

"Hey, can you get out of the comms system?" the person in charge of the security detail snapped. "So we can at least fake some normalcy?"

"After you tell me how you got in," the previously-laughing person put in.

"I got in because I can find things, and that includes the way into your communications system," John deadpanned. Then he hopped out of the communications line before they could retort.

Ben suddenly gestured across the room. "Speaking of strange things, do you happen to know the person walking in right now?"

John cast a lazy glance over his shoulder. "Yep. He's party-crashing. Don't mind him. The phrase 'harmless' hides from him, but he won't de-gut you if you don't give him reason to."

"And he is...?"

"Dead," John flatly said. He took pride in the odd looks from the other two. "We call him Dead Boy."

"...Right..." Ben managed.

Dead Boy walked smoothly over, giving a boisterous grin to anyone who gave him an odd look. Then he saw somebody, probably a random person he just wanted to frighten, and shot a glare at them. They looked away quickly. Dead Boy continued on his path until he reached John and the other two. "Hi!" he said, looking at Alex. "Have I killed you before or something? You look familiar."

Alex shrugged, but John nodded. "You should. You ran him over with your car."

"Oh. Well, then that's not my fault because I don't drive. It's the car's fault."

Ben's eye twitched. "You need to run that one by me again."

"You need me to run you over with the car again? But I ran him over!" He pointed at Alex for emphasis.

"I never before thought I could get run over by a flying car," Alex said aloud. "But then, there was a lot of stuff I didn't think would happen before I went to the Nightside. What have you decided to damn us with by your presence?"

Dead Boy turned to John. "I thought you should know... the Lord of Thorns went missing."

He raised an eyebrow. "Past tense?"

"Then he showed up. He had risen late from bed. And then taken a brief walk."

"... And this is important because...?"

"Because I wanted to have some level of an excuse to face you with when really all I wanted to do was crash a party because I had nothing better to do."

"I think I can safely say you fooled no one."

"I take pride in that statement."

The murmurs from the other representatives rose until someone called out, "Who the hell are you two?" All other voices stopped, shocked by the brusqueness of whoever had spoken. That person seemed too embarrassed to have suddenly voiced their opinion aloud to step forward, however.

Dead Boy turned around. He glanced at John. "I'm going to let you handle this, 'cause I don't even know what this whole thing is about. Hey, does your Gift work over here?"

" 'Course," John said, although it didn't. It wasn't like he was going to let anyone else know that, however. "It's a bunch of representatives from around the world, and he," he gestured at Alex, who waved, "decided there should be a representative from the Nightside."

Dead Boy snorted. "Yeah, and you're the perfect person for that," he sarcastically remarked.

"Oh hush." To the watching onlookers, who had watched all of this, he loudly announced, "We're from the Nightside, not like that means anything to you. Who are you?" When no one said anything, he said, "Oh come on, don't be rude and demand to know who we are and then not answer."

"You're representing the Nightside?" someone near the front said carefully. "I'm a representative from South Africa."

John frowned. "Wait. Representative? Hold on, who do you represent?" He pointed at a random person.

"...China," the person said cautiously.

"And you?"

"Russia."

"You?"

"Greece. Is this going somewh-"

"You?"

"Poland."

He eyed them all. "Who chose you as representatives? You're terrible! A representative is supposed to be an example of what the people are like! You, Chinese person. Most of your people are having trouble with overpopulation and economy issues, while you look like you're living the good life, which you probably are. You Greek are an even worse example of a collapsing economy, and that American looks nothing like a country struggling with bombing the crap out of anyone it doesn't like.*"

Dead Boy snorted. "Yeah, and you're a perfect representative of the Nightside."

"Hey, I never said anyone here was a great representative. Who are you representing?"

"No one."

"Well, everyone here's supposed to represent someone."

Alex glanced at Ben. "Then who are you here for?"

Ben thought for a moment. "Well... the nation of Pissed Off Subordinates Forced into Crappy Jobs With Even Worse Superiors."

Dead Boy laughed. "If we're going down that road, then I'm representing all the duct tape, staple, and stitches mass-producing places." His shoulder jerked back suddenly, and as if that had been a hit from an epiphany, he said, "No, no! That's not right. The dead. I'm representing all the dead people."

The American senator frowned. "You can't represent the dead!"

At that moment, Dead Boy's arm fell off. Three people fainted, several screamed, and quite a lot threw up.

He looked at it. Ben stared at the limb. Alex looked at the other one to see if it would fall off too. John nudged it with his foot.

Dead Boy shrugged, reaching into a pocket to take out a staple gun. "These things happen." He yelled, "Shut up!" at the screaming people, then hefted his arm up, provoking several more pukes and faints, and proceeded to slam the staple gun into his arm, securing it back into place. "This is your fault, Taylor," he snapped. "This is from the incident with the stupid frog faerie. At least hold it in there while I get it back in place."

"Actually, I think that was from the sniper as a part of the security detail here," Ben put in.

"Oh. There's still one intact, even with Taylor here?"

John shrugged. "Well, I felt kinda sorry for them, having to guard this lot."

"And I assume you didn't mention the rent-a-cops who-"

"That's a story for another dimension."

Dead Boy rolled his shoulder as he finished stapling his arm back on. "Going to need some duct tape for that. Anything else we have to do here?"

John looked around. "I don't know. I was just kinda standing here."

"How does that not hurt?" someone with an Australian-like accent said to Dead Boy.

"I'm dead. Need some serious booze to feel anything, really." He shrugged. "Well, I'm going. This was incredibly boring, even for a party-crashing. So... I'm going. Kid, don't get run over by any flying cars. Dead immortals, unite!"

And he walked right back out the way he had come.

As soon as he disappeared, he walked right back. "By the way, there's a time slip right outside in the hallway, so you need to fix that when you come back. Bye!"

And then he was gone again.

John turned to the other two. "If that's it, I'm going." And then he walked outside too.

Alex snickered.

* * *

* WE DO NOT SPEAK FROM OUR OPINIONS. IF YOU ARE FROM CHINA, GREECE, OR AMERICA, DO NOT BE OFFENDED, PLEASE! This is what we pictured John Taylor would say! I'm sorry if that's offensive. Both of us are Americans, if that helps.

**Work by Tsuki (_SamayouTamashi_) and Sekai (_NightmareWorld_). If you like this, find our individual works. We update those a trillion times faster.**


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